I Always Trust You
by Watashi-wa-inori-tsuzukeru
Summary: "...and I always end up screwed." Kevin, Dean, Cas, a hunter's pyre, and a goodbye. Spoilers 9x09. Kevin Tran Winchester tribute. T for language, dark themes.


**A/N: **_**SPOILERS FOR 9 X 09. **_A tribute to Kevin Tran Winchester. I just watched S9E9 and...it hit hard. I wanted to commemorate Kevin. My running theory, with Osric Chau's departure from the SPN cast, is that they'll have Cas not be able to heal Kevin, perhaps because with his borrowed Grace he isn't strong enough to. The worst part of the entire thing for me was Dean and Ken's convo about how shit goes wrong when Kevin trusts him. By the end of the ep, remembering that was the knife in the heart. Regardless...I think it's time to say goodbye.

_The beginning of this fic, in refrerence to the "silence in parts", is a nod/tribute to Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles. I can only hope I'm not making a mockery of such an amazing author and his work by adapting it here. Credit and love for said silence goes to him, who can say so much without speaking._

* * *

In the Bunker, there was silence. It was deep, deeper than six-feet-down could ever taste, and unmoving, like glazed eyes, like no eyes, like smoke trails suspended in the air, still as a pair of ropes on a hanging tree, no wind, no movement, to flicker a stirring. It was a silence in parts, in pieces.

One of these pieces was the simplistic lack of presence. No living thing remained in those stone walls and floors seeped in the tired-eyed, booze-bubble, aged-paper color of a not-ideal-but-something life. It was there, in the air, still, smelling of burnt skin and ink and broken glass: their life. Their own slice-of-pie. Not apple-pie American, not picket-fence happy dreams, but theirs. It was more time with aching and bruised eyes squinted open than troubled sleep; a hand on the shoulder, quick, lucky-rabbit quick, but gruffly firm, something that said _brother_; cheap, greasy food more often than not because that was normal, some small bit of it, and that was better than rich meals cooked in the kitchen, especially since none of them could cook anyway; dirty runs out to the tiny supermarket to buy more pencils and notebooks and beer, and bottle caps used to play table-football between turning pages; gunmetal and oil, salt and sulfur and silver, murmuring chants and laptops and late nights and only family for company; and this, this had been home.

Now, it was silent. Not even the monster in his prison remained, because they were never going back through those doors, not for all the damned good in the world. There was blood on the floors now and it wouldn't be right, wouldn't ever be right, to walk over that grave.

The other silence was harder to notice. It lingered outside, less obvious because it wasn't a lack of life, just a lack of something. It got muddled and hushed up in the breeze, because when wasn't Kansas windy, or the low grumble of the river, or the sputter of flame and far-off crunch of pavement and rubber and engines. It was the silence of two men—whether they were more or less than human cannot be said—who stood before a pyre. It was a good pyre, damn good. The kind one of their own deserved. The kind there never should have been but was. The two men stood before it quietly, unspeaking, still with solemnity and grave dirt.

The last silence was something more profound still. It was not something anyone looking in for a moment could recognize. It was not even something either of the men could see. It was in them, in one of them. Smooth, cut-tie, ashes and too-numb-to-sting. Something no amount of alcohol or miles underfoot or miracles would fix. It was too patient for that, too deep, too gray. This last silence was not the sound of a man waiting to die; but it _was_ the silence of a man already dead, beating heart not beating, shocked back into rhythm one too many empty times.

The firelight burnished this man's face in gold, his cheekbones brassy, his eyes dark, reddish pits, so sunken that one might think it was him who'd been burned up black from the inside-out; and maybe it was. Maybe he wished it was, if he was still capable of feeling enough to wish for bullshit and pray for things that'd never be because, goddamn, this was the fucked up world they'd asked for.

The man clenched his hands, skin sallow where the ember's seething glow didn't reach. Between his calloused thumb and forefinger he crumpled a half-folded scrap square of canary-yellow paper, black letters cutting across its surface, black blood stark against cheerful feathers, like char, like stains, like something that was never going away. A glaring red line scratched accusingly through the second word on the paper, and below the scribbling, a tear-drop, bitter-anger blood-oath in red ink: **_WINCHESTER._**

_Kevin Winchester._

Because he was family. He was a brother. He was one of the big pieces of the little tiny something they'd had.

He was gone.

The fire burned his bones, the flame honored and purified and maybe, just maybe when the tongues of orange and gold flickered, maybe they looked like wings, honest-to-fuckin'-God wings, not like the bastardized monsters that walked the damned earth now, but something real. Something good. 'Cause this kid…this man…this sibling in the fire, he'd been something _good, _something worthy of bein' called angelic.

But while the pyre ate his body, the silence ate up what was left of him. He was in the lungs and heart of the man with the paper, but the silence smothered him. He was quiet now, patient. He let it. He let it do whatever the Hell it fuckin' wanted, because him tryin' never did jackshit but get good people dead.

He stood hunch-broad-shouldered, free hand buried in his heavy jacket's pocket, where his nails bit at his skin and bled him like a stuck pig. The tension in his frame was a palpable, listless thing. A loaded gun with a broken trigger. Cold. Hard. Battered. Deadly. Ineffective. Useless. Scrap. Waiting.

Waiting.

The flames finally started munching on the second layer of thick kindling and roared higher, chasing shadow, almost as if to make up for the wordless bystanders.

"…Dean."

It was not the waiting man who spoke, but his brother, perhaps his only remaining one and—_goddammit. _This man wore a suit drenched in his own blood, white-rugged-scarlet. Whereas the other man's soft breaths were gray, his were more syrupy light and dawn-streaked frost, something almost resembling a chilly Thursday morning, something a little distorted and a little warm from the sun behind it.

The man with the paper didn't respond.

"Dean, I…" The tepid-morning-man bowed his head, clearer-than-all-days blue eyes warped dark in the firelight. The planes of his face were smooth with grace, his voice cracked and hewn and tempered and even. He had strength to his jaw and a vulnerable truth in his gaze. It was the acceptance of monstrosity, the floating-away, sure-footed step of a martyred fool and a misguided, gold-paved, hell-bound soldier of good. In many ways, he was more human than the man at his side for this; but yet, he was not, and the soft-spoken sureness of war behind his grace-touched eyes said so.

Still, despite his eyes, his tone held the weight of the weary world, regret and apology. Not enough, not enough, when did they ever do anything that was enough, either of them, they—

"I'm sorry, Dean. I thought…this grace, it's…I am not what I was, Dean, and I cannot make up for that. I…liked Kevin. He was a virtuous soul, a reputable prophet. He will have a resting place in Heav—"

"There is no goddamn Heaven, Cas."

Dean spoke through chapped, splintered lips, his jaw not moving, hushing and hardening the words. His voice was hardly an exhale, yet the sentence was whip-crack, earth-boned, final.

"Dean—"

"Stop. Just stop."

They quieted again.

The smoke filling the clearing dyed the leaves of the surrounding trees grief-colored and choked them. They fluttered gently upward, as if reaching for salvation that no longer existed, rooted to their earthly plane in cruel poison.

"The Greeks held their prophets in high esteem. They often depicted their seers as being recipients of their god and goddesses' blessings before their eventual rape, sacrifice, or murder."

There was just the barest flicker of _something _in Dean's dead-grim-glass eyes as they flickered over to the lesser angel-reborn. It was a ghost, but it was still an echo of something familiar: the almost bewildered annoyance that Castiel had come to associate with the hunter's cry of "'what the Hell, Cas?" Dean even angled one of his shoulders slightly towards his companion, displaying a fleeting, desperate shard of attention.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Dean murmured caustically, not quite a question as much as an almost-there, disgruntled mutter.

Cas returned the not-dewy stare that usually equated to the awkward angel's reticent version of a shrug, saying without words he'd only been trying to help.

"I do not know anymore, Dean." Cas replied instead. Dean inhaled through his nose, and grunted. He turned back to the pyre, foot shuffling a centimeter, maybe, just maybe two, scratching at leafy dust.

"He was bitchin' about how every time he trusted me, shit went wrong. And I told him 'not every time.' Not every time." Dean's voice was dying again. Sepulchral. Broken without the cracks.

One of the logs shifted and broken, throwing up black flakes and bright, burning stars and a puff of sparks. With the loss of that piece, the pyre began to sag. Breaking. Ruined. Like so many promises.

"I didn't deserve his trust. He was too good a kid." Dean whispered.

Then, he took a half-step forward, lifting his arm, slow and trembling with an awful age in such young and anguished bones, and let the paper go. It fluttered, fell towards the flames, missed. Dean stared down at it for a second, perched on the dirt.

He kept staring.

"Dean." Cas said again, gentle but firm, a velvet-wrapped hammer.

Dean didn't move. Sighing feather-memory soft to himself, Cas bent at the knees, reaching to retrieve it himself.

Dean's hand snapped out and shoved him violently away, the whole of his arm, his shoulder, the curl of his back and twist of his hips and his feet on the ground behind the blow. Cas went sprawling on his bony ass, mud and leaves clinging to the butt of his suit pants.

Cas glanced up at Dean, gemstones and shadows. No—there was smoldering in those shadows. Maybe not dead. Maybe just buried so deep, so choked, that it would be a long time before the fire grew hot enough below to boil peat and melt rock and burn up the world and all its horrible, goddamn, fucked-up shit.

Something in the nothing. Just maybe. They knew better than anybody else, after all, that what was dead didn't always stay that way, good or bad or just plain screwed.

Cas got slowly back to his feet. Dean exhaled gustily, noisily, and snatched the paper back up. He looked at it again, murmured angel strained his ears.

_Go live somewhere better than this._

Then, as Castiel watched, with more deliberate care than before, Dean stuck his numb-from-Kansas-night-cold fingers nearly in the coals, and let the name go with one more promise:

"See ya around, Kev."


End file.
